1. Field of the Invention
This invention is related to a Chinese language dictionary of characters.
2. Description of Related Art
A Character by definition, is a symbol or a picture. The original Chinese characters were actual physical pictures. They were used to record events and to express thoughts. The character SUN was a picture of the sun {character pullout} and the character MOON was a half-picture of the moon {character pullout}.
After centuries of transformation and simplification, Chinese characters lost their original identities and pictures. The character SUN became {character pullout} and the character MOON became {character pullout} as used today.
Because of the limited supply of pictures and the complexity of some pictures, existing pictures were combined with others to meet the demand for expressing various thoughts and events. The new combined pictures (consisting of a simple character or a root) generally reflected the characteristics of the old ones or instance, the character (CLEAR {character pullout}) is derived by combining the characters (SUN {character pullout}) and (MOON {character pullout}). The sun gives light during the day and the moon gives light at night. Things on earth are always clear because there is light from the sky during the day and night.
Another example is the character (GOOD {character pullout}). It is made of the characters (GIRL {character pullout} and BOY {character pullout}). The marriage between a body and a girl creates joy, and produces babies that preserves the human race, so this is good. A forest ({character pullout}) is a place where many tree/wood ({character pullout}) grow. It can be seen that the Chinese characters were pictures with thoughts drawn together.
Many of the original pictures became the basic building blocks (Roots in today's dictionary) for the Chinese written language. There are 210 roots listed in Root-Table in the Chinese dictionary for finding characters. The majority of these roots are related to the objects that were known by man during the early age of history, such as:
(sun {character pullout}), (moon {character pullout}), (gold {character pullout}), (tree {character pullout}), (fire {character pullout}), (water {character pullout}), (land {character pullout}), (glass {character pullout}), (fish {character pullout}), (bird {character pullout}), (insect {character pullout}), (horse {character pullout}), (man {character pullout}), (boy {character pullout}), and (girl {character pullout}).
A "Root" is a simple character and has meaning. It has one or more strokes or other roots such as root SOUND {character pullout} which has roots {character pullout} and {character pullout}. A root can be anywhere in a character. By definition, all roots in the Root-Table in a dictionary are the HEAD ({character pullout}) of the character (principle root). Root after the HEAD ({character pullout}) is BODY ({character pullout}) of the character (secondary root). The character HEAD has only one root and BODY may have one or more roots as illustrated below.
With the "roots", other characters were formed by combining with itself or with others root(s). such as shown in the FIG. 1:
The Chinese written language and its writing rules had been invented and used over 5,000 years ago. They were formalized (characters used today) about 3000 years ago. These characters were recorded in a book according their Roots and number of strokes for each root. A Root-Table (Index) shown in FIG. 2, contains all the roots for looking for characters.
To look for a character, the user has to: 1) know what is the head (root) for the character, 2) count the number of strokes in the Root, 3) look for the root in the group of roots with the same number of strokes in the Root-table, 4) go to the page number in the dictionary indicated by the Root-table, 5) count the remaining strokes (without its principal Root) in the character, 6) look for the character where the group of characters with the same strokes are located.
Based on above instructions, one might expect that looking for a character in a Chinese dictionary is clear without obstacles, but it is not. The most difficult obstacle faced in trying to locate a character is the requirement of knowing what is the head of the character.
Although Roots in a dictionary are the head ({character pullout}) of the character by definition, some Roots such as {character pullout} are actually the last parts of the characters, such as {character pullout} and {character pullout}.
In addition, some characters have the head and body interchanged, such as {character pullout}. According to the Root-Table, its head is {character pullout} but its first root is {character pullout}. By the same token, {character pullout} whose first root is {character pullout} but {character pullout} is the head root according to the Root-Table.
Furthermore, some characters whose Roots are not recognizable by users with average knowledge of Chinese writing, such as {character pullout}. According to the Root-Table, {character pullout} is with root .sup.-- and {character pullout} is with root {character pullout}.
In view of these problems, about 1000 characters are hard to find. These characters are listed under the title "Hard To Find Characters {character pullout}" see Table 4 of the Appendix. The characters here are listed by number of strokes and page number, not by roots.
Due to the complexity in looking for characters with the Root-Table, the Root-Table had been revised a few times since its inception. The number of Roots were reduced from about 500 to the 210 in today's Root-Table which was revised in the 1800s.). To use today's Root-table to find characters, however, faces the same problems as before.
By late 1920/early 1930, a new method was invented by Chinese scholars. This method used numerical number 0 to 9 to present the stroke type at each corner of the character. The title for this method was called the "FOUR CORNER METHOD" (U.S. Pat. No. 4,559,615 Adapted this method for a Chinese word-processor).
One of the inventors was impressed with the simplicity to use the "FOUR CORNER METHOD" method to find characters in this new dictionary. However, after continual use, the one inventor found that the new method to find characters was more difficult to use in practice then using the Root-table. Today, the "FOUR CORNER METHOD" is still used by a few dictionaries to supplement the Root-Table.